Anna Politkovskaya Award

Anna Politkovskaya Award
The Anna Politkovskaya Award was established in 2006 to remember and honor the Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya (1958–2006), murdered in Moscow on 7 October 2006 in order to silence her reporting about the war in Chechnya.
The award is presented annually by the international human rights organisation RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in War), and honours women human rights defenders from around the world, who work in war and conflict zones, often at great personal risk. Mariana Katzarova, a friend and a human rights colleague of Politkovskaya, founded RAW in WAR (Reach All Women in WAR) and the Anna Politkovskaya Award in 2006 in London, after being a journalist and human rights advocate in the war zones of Kosovo, Bosnia and Chechnya.
In 2016, to mark the tenth anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, an additional special award was presented to a woman human rights defender from Russia who, like Anna Politkovskaya and the first winner of the award, Natalia Estemirova, who was murdered in Chechnya in 2009, has worked to build peace in conflict zones and help civilians trapped between opposing armed forces. The special award was presented to Valentina Cherevatenko who, since 1990, has intervened in a succession of conflicts in the former Soviet Union, working through her organisation, the Women of the Don NGO.
In October 2018, ahead of the 12th anniversary of the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, RAW in WAR presented the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award to Binalakshmi Nepram, a courageous indigenous human rights defender and author from the state of Manipur, on the Indo-Myanmar border area, and Svetlana Alexievich, a writer and investigative journalist from Belarus and the 2015 Nobel Prize laureate in literature.
A group of more than 100 influential cultural and political leaders joined the Committee of Supporters for the RAW in WAR Anna Politkovskaya Award. Among them are:
Nobel Women's Initiative
Mairead Maguire (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Betty Williams (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Jody Williams (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Shirin Ebadi (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Rigoberta Menchú Tum (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Archbishop Desmond Tutu (Nobel Peace Prize Laureate)
Tatiana Yankelevich
Vaclav Havel
Jon Snow
John Pilger
Amy Goodman
Jeremy Bowen
Andre Glucksmann
Gloria Steinem
Sergey Kovalyov
Alexei Simonov
Vladimir Bukovsky
Svetlana Gannushkina
Lyudmila Alekseeva
Karinna Moskalenko
Lyse Doucet
Lindsey Hilsum
Gillian Slovo
Eva Hoffman
Adam Michnik
Oleg Panfilov
Tom Stoppard
Bernard-Henri Lévy
Natasha Kandic
Elisabeth Rehn
Zbigniew Brzezinski
Mariane Pearl
Azar Nafisi
Asma Jahangir
Carl Gershman
Hina Jilani
Susan Sarandon
Jane Birkin
Sophie Shihab
Naomi Klein
Sister Helen Prejean
Ariel Dorfman
Vanessa Redgrave
Eve Ensler
Michael Cunningham
John Sweeney
Jonathan Schell
Noam Chomsky
Marina Litvinenko
Lucy Ash
Sussan Deyhim
Heidi Bradner
Desmond O'Malley
Anne Nivat
Annabel Markova
Lord Frank Judd
Lord Nicolas Rea
Shirley Williams
Lord Anthony Giddens
Lord Nazir Ahmed
Baroness Molly Meacher
Baroness Vivien Stern
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC
Dame Evelyn Glennie
Yakin Erturk
Elena Kudimova
Andrey Nekrasov
Peter Gabriel
Stina Scott
Anna Stavitskaya
Dubravka Ugresic
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Victor Navasky
Holly Near
Joan Baez
Elizabeth Frank
Elizabeth Kostova
Bill Bowring
Irena Grudzinska Gross
Monica Ali
Isa Blyden
Nayereh Tohidi
Claire Bertschinger
Tsvetana Maneva
Elif Shafak
Laureates
2007: Natalia Estemirova (1958–2009), Russia / Chechnya
2008: Malalai Joya (1978–), Afghanistan
2009: One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality, Iran (human rights lawyer, Leila Alikarami received the award on behalf of the One Million Signatures Campaign)
2010: Halima Bashir, Sudan / Darfur
2011: Razan Zaitouneh (1977–), Syria
2012: Marie Colvin (1956–2012), US
2013: Malala Yousafzai (1997–), Pakistan
2014: Vian Dakhil (1971–), Iraq
2015: Kholoud Waleed (1984–), Syria
2016: Jineth Bedoya Lima (1974–), Colombia and special 10th-anniversary award for Valentina Cherevatenko (1956–), Russia
2017: Gulalai Ismail (1986–), Pakistan and Gauri Lankesh (1962–2017), India
2018: Svetlana Alexievich (1948–), Belarus and Binalakshmi Nepram, India
2019: Alex Crawford (1963–), UK
2020: Radhya Al-Mutawakel (1967–), Yemen
2021: Fawzia Koofi (1975–), Afghanistan
References
External links
RAW for Women and Girl Survivors in War
“We really need you, Anna!”: The winners of the 2018 Anna Politkovskaya Award, Svetlana Alexievich and Binalakshmi Nepram write a letter to Anna Politkovskaya, 9 October 2018
"Remembering Anna Politkovskaya, who was killed for telling the truth", The Washington Post, 8 October 2018
British awards
Human rights awards
Awards established in 2007